1933: James Meredith,
a civil rights activist and the first black student to enroll at the University
of Mississippi, was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi. (June 25)

1940:William
Faulkner published A Point of Law in Colliers,
a story he will later revise for inclusion in the novel Go Down, Moses.
(June 22)

1941:Richard
Wright accepted the Spingam Award from the NAACP at its convention
in Houston. (June 27)

1948:Music from Spain by Eudora
Welty was published by The Levee Press in Greenville, Mississippi.
(June 23)

1964:The Eccentricities of a Nightingale by Tennessee
Williams and starring Edie Adams premiered at Tappan Zee Playhouse
in Nyak, New York. (June 25)

1964:Eudora Welty
submitted her story Where Is the Voice Coming From? to The
New Yorker. It would be published almost immediately in the July 6
issue. (June 26)

1965: Fiction writer P. H. Lowrey died. (June 24)

NEWS about MISSISSIPPI WRITERS

John Marszaleck, Mississippi State historian, named best
speaker by national organization

June 10, 2002

John
F. Marszaleck

STARKVILLE, Miss.  An award-winning Mississippi
State historian recognized for his diverse publications now is receiving honors
for his speaking skills.

John F. Marszalek, author of 11 books and more
than 150 articles, recently was voted the highest-rated speaker for the Lincoln
Forum, a national Gettysburg, Pa., gathering of scholars interested in Abraham
Lincoln and the American Civil War.

Forum chairman Frank J. Williams, chief justice
of the Rhode Island supreme court, said Marszalek joins a distinguished group
recognized by the six-year-old professional body.

Based on evaluations by this year’s forum participants,
Marszalek rated 9.33 on a 10-point scale. Symonds, a historian at the U.S. Naval
Academy, was second at 9.24. Marszelek’s presentation focused on the subject
of a forthcoming book about the life of Union Army commander and chief of staff
Gen. Henry Halleck.

A Lincoln Forum charter member, Marszalek recently
was appointed to a 15-member national advisory committee for the Abraham Lincoln
Bicentennial celebration in 2009.

One of the top William L. Giles Distinguished
Professors since 1994, Marszalek concludes a 29-year MSU faculty career with
retirement on June 30. During his career in Starkville, he has written Assault
at West Point: The Court Martial of Johnson Whitaker, which became a Showtime
cable movie.

Two of his other books  The Petticoat
Affair and Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order  were main
selections of the History Book Club. In addition, Petticoat Affair won
the Southeastern Library Association’s Non-Fiction Award and Sherman
was a featured alternate selection of the Book of the Month Club.

Tom Franklin, Grisham writer-in-residence at Ole Miss, ends year
with new novel

June 17, 2002

Tom
Franklin

OXFORD, Miss.  You could say novelist
Tom Franklin raised Hell during his year as Grisham
Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi.

His forthcoming novel is Hell at the Breech,
a fictionalized history of brutal events that took place 12 miles from his Alabama
home. Franklin leaves the prestigious UM post savoring the opportunity to work
in American novelist William Faulkners backyard.

I could wander downstairs from my marvelous
office and be on Faulkners land in five minutes, said Franklin,
who came to Oxford after a stint as a visiting writer-in-residence at Knox College
in Galesburg, Ill. Walking the place has helped me tremendously; its
much better than Illinois to a guy writing about a Southern landscape.

Franklin soon assumes a similar position at
the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn. Upon leaving UM, he joins an impressive
group of other former Grisham writers, including T.R. Pearson, Mary Hood, Darcey
Steinke, Steve Yarbrough and Claude Willkinson.

I enjoyed the students here (at UM). Theyre
very smart, and the best of them are the best Ive seen anywhere,
said Franklin, who last year was one of 183 Guggenheim fellows in the U.S. and
Canada.

Having to say farewell to extremely talented
people is the only downside to the Grisham program, said Joseph Urgo, chair
of the UM Department of English. Tom Franklin has been a tremendous asset
to us this year; in a short time he attracted a strong and loyal following among
our students, Urgo said. We'll look forward to following his post-Grisham
career.

During the year, Franklin taught undergraduate
and graduate students in a two-semester fiction writing class. You write
for the joy of it; publication is a bonus, he told a group of aspiring
writers at the 2001 Oxford Conference for the Book, sponsored in part by UM.
He praised the Grisham program for its tangible provisions: writing time and
financial support.

The intangibles, also of tremendous benefit,
include living in this very literary town just a block from Faulkners
estate and knowing that writers I admire have shown such confidence in my future
that they wanted me to spend a year writing, he said.

A native of Dickinson, Ala., Franklin remains
connected indirectly to the University of Mississippi, with his wife, Beth Ann
Fennelly, joining the UM English faculty this fall as a visiting professor in
poetry and literary studies. Open House, her first book of poems, won
the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry for a First Book, one of the nations
most prestigious awards for new authors.

The annual appointment, which includes housing
and a stipend, was funded in 1993 by best-selling author John
Grisham and his wife, Renee. It requires writers to teach writing workshops
and participate in department activities.

Journalists need for math skills prompts profs new
book

June 18, 2002

OXFORD, Miss.  Journalists are known to
joke that they would be engineers or scientists if they could simply do the
math.

Just for them, University of Mississippi assistant
professor Kathleen Wickham has written the book Math Tools for Journalists.

Math is something we learned in middle
school. We cant assume that we remember all the steps, said Wickham,
a New Jersey native with daily newspaper experience.

Todays reporters and editors deal every
day with mathematics  from local government budgets to basic statistics
and practical arithmetic. Wickham said the handy, 160-page guide was written
in part to address her own math-skills weaknesses, which she rediscovered as
a doctoral student taking a statistics course. I just got tired of being
stupid, she said.

Each chapter uses a news story to illustrate
a specific, real need to use math. My goal is for this book to be used
in journalism classrooms to improve the math literacy for future journalists,
and in newsrooms to improve math skills in the professional ranks, said
Wickham, who joined the UM faculty three years ago, after a decade of teaching
at the University of Memphis.

With a masters degree in journalism and
a doctorate in instructional technology, she teaches media writing, ethics and
graduate research methods. Her first book focused on online journalism.

Peter Mattiace, a Colorado journalist, is one
of the first to purchase the new book. You dont have to be a rocket
scientist to be a journalist, but it often helps, he said. Good
reporters, and good and bad numbers sometimes just dont mix. So, whether
you have to figure a tax increase in Nowhere Township, a dip in the unemployment
rate or how Enron lost all that money  all that fast  you need Professor
Wickhams book before you start. Its as simple as 1, 2, ah, 3.

Her first educational order came from the journalism
program at Northwestern University. Wickham anticipates interest from other
university journalism programs, because new national accrediting standards call
for improved student math skills.

Shell also be part of national panels
on math in classrooms and newsrooms during conferences by the Society of Professional
Journalists and the Association of Education in Journalism and Mass Communications.

She said she dedicated the book to her two
sons. The younger one even helped cook meals. His college tuition is coming
from this, she said.